Castlevania III - True Ending
Hello. I would like to share something, something big. You may not believe me, but at least let me explain… I have been playing retro games since I was a child. Mainly the NES, but I never had a huge collection as a child, but I did own: Super Mario Bros 2, Mega Man IV, and other games. Some obscure, some popular. I had also owned a Game Boy Color, but I had been more interested with the NES as I grew up with it, therefore being more used to it, and I had trouble seeing the screen in the sunlight. That usually caused frustration which is why I had only'' two games for it at the time: Super Mario Land and Castlevania: The Adventure. Super Mario Land came with a Game Boy for my Birthday. And Castlevania: The Adventure was a game that I got from some rich person along with a custom Game Boy Color that was painted to look fitting for the game. My sister was sick that day so I decided to give her half of my candy and my Game Boy which is why I no longer own one. On my 19th Birthday I had been given enough Game Boy Color games to be the size of a Rubix Cube as well as multiple NES games, one of them being Castlevania III: Dracula’s Curse. But I couldn’t beat it, even on weekends due to its difficulty and how long the game was. I never even knew any Cheat Codes for the game because I never had a subscription for Nintendo Power so I never bothered messing around with the Password screen until I figured out a Cheat. That is, until one Saturday evening... There was a thunderstorm which caused the Internet to go out for several hours, which made me very bored until I remembered my NES. Unfortunately, I had lost many of the games and one Controller while moving. But I did find a game that I had forgotten about: Dracula’s Curse. I was a Castlevania fan and was very aware of the game, but I had completely forgotten about owning it. I decided that it would be fun to play this game again on an NES than a ROM that was absolute crap. So I put the game in the NES and turned on the console. The intro was just how I remembered it, but it understandably had multiple glitches. For example: some sprites would flash sporadically, some letters being replaced with other letters/numbers, exedra. I decided to mess around on the password screen to see if I could discover some unknown Cheat Codes. I ended up discovering ''one, but I can’t remember what it was as I wasn’t really paying much attention. When I pressed Start, I was brought up to a screen similar to the Game Over screen. But instead of the text saying “Game Over” it was “Third_QuestCANCELLED” with the “Continue” and “End” options instead being “Start_Questhree” and “Start_Intro”. I didn’t think twice after reading the text and immediately selected Start_Questhree, I was very excited because I had discovered not only an unknown Cheat Code, but also discovering an even harder difficulty than the Second Quest. This is when the game began. It was Stage A-03, the Castle Keep. I was happy that I had gotten to an area that I never been to before, but I couldn’t help but feel nervous. I had watched a video of this fight on Youtube and it looked pretty hard. Having to beat three awfully difficult yet clever bosses without dying, and if you died then you had to start at a Checkpoint that was two stages away from the last level seemed like a nightmare from hell to me. It didn’t help that I didn’t have Sypha or Grant, only Alucard without any upgrades. Anyways, I climbed the Stairs of Destiny (almost falling off because of my excitement) and entered Dracula’s throne room as Alucard. As I prepared for the worst, a Text Box appeared. This surprised me because Text Boxes only appeared when you rescue a “Spirit”, and Dracula was never a playable character in the classic games. It said: “Alucard, what brings you here?” after this, I was given two choices. They were “BADENDING_QUEST3” and “QUEST3_DRACULATRIGGER”. Of course, I didn’t want to get a bad ending so I selected the second option, Dracula now said: “You have brought a Belmont to my Keep? Very swell of you to join me in killing this pathetic mortal.” the text was cheesy, and I couldn't help but smerking. That is, until the battle began... The battle that seemed impossible then occurred, having to fight both the Dracula and the Alucard boss seemed impossible. With only the Dagger Subweapon with 15 Hearts to help me, I wasted almost all of my Hearts in a desperate attempt to hit the two vampires. Alucard couldn’t die, his death animation would just play upon being hit with the screaming sound when you killed a face in the 2nd Phase of this fight. When the scream ended, his death animation just reversed and he would continue attacking my character. Fortunately, each time I hit Dracula it dealt 4 ticks of damage and in a stroke of luck I had used my last Heart to throw a Dagger which hit Dracula before Alucard could “resurrect” and Dracula was beheaded. His head turning into red pixels that fell off the screen. His body then exploded into miniature heads just like the game when he would transform into his second form, but this time Alucard joined in on the transformation. The heads and bats came together and morphed into a skeletal abomination made out of previously existing sprites from the game. The thing looked like a pile of bones, with long skeletal claws and a head that looked down at my charater with black, souless eye sockets. But the boss was heavily unfinished. The thing just stood there, staring at my character with an eerie gaze that disturbed me. It was like a predator stalking its prey, waiting to attack. It took much more hits than it should have, taking a whole minute to take down. When the monster’s health had fully depleted it began to melt into flame, parts of it falling to the floor and then bursting into flames. It let out an ear piercing screech that sounded nothing like the other screams in the game. It was like a young woman had screamed into a microphone, then it was distorted, and finally pixelated. The castle began to crumble, and my character walked off-screen. I thought he would die from the falling blocks as he only had 2 ticks of health left, but he just walked through the blocks like they were in the Background. After the screen faded to white and the shock from that god awful screech wore off, I was very happy. Not only did I beat a Quest that was presumably the hardest difficulty in the game, but also had a very interesting story to tell. Finally, the ending came, but it wasn’t something that I had expected… “The struggle against Dracula and Alucard has been terminated, Europe is now safe. But Trevor knows not all of the monsters died while Castlevania crumbled to the ground as the sun began to shine once more. The woods are still populated with the minions of the Prince of Darkness, and would continue to feast upon unsuspecting victims and then repopulate the crumbled castle. Trevor hoped that another Vampire Killer would come to take his place once he died from his wounds, and would survive to prevent the Count’s resurrection…” My jaw dropped, I beat an almost impossible boss fight and barely surviving with the reward of the worst ending in the game?! I was actually pretty upset as the intro played and the game reset. I tried everything on the Password screen in a desperate attempt to get the Third Quest again, but nothing worked. Eventually the thunderstorm ended and I looked it up on Google, but only got useless links such as Irina's 3rd Quest and useless crap like that. The only proof I had that this happened is a couple of screenshots I had taken on my camera. I can only assume that this game was meant to be the prequel to Castlevania: Bloodlines, but I guess it may have just been a corruption... Right?